How to succeed with your academic papers: thesis topic ideas

Success on an academic paper can be a matter of choosing a good topic. For most students, a good topic is one they can choose with some guidelines. Having too much freedom to choose tends to make students have difficulty narrowing down their options. Instructors need to give some guidelines, like categories or broad topic choices. Then, students need to be able to choose from those narrowed options.

Narrow Your Topic to the Curricular Area of Your Degree

The type of degree you are working on will determine the category of your thesis. For example, if you are working on a degree in math, you probably will not write a thesis about Shakespeare plays, unless you are busy looking around for math formulas in the plays. To pick a strong topic that will lead to a successful paper, you should decide on a subtopic in your curricular area. So, if you are studying literature, you could narrow your topics to literature written in the Elizabethan period. By choosing a subtopic, you are able to narrow your choices to curricular areas that interest you the most.

Look for a New and Noteworthy Topic

When you choose a thesis topic, you will want to choose something new and noteworthy. So, if you are going to work on Elizabethan literature, you might want to show the connections to the modern YA paranormal novel. This might seem far-fetched, but it would certainly be new and noteworthy. However, if you have found that there are many other thesis writers who have already tackled this idea, then you should look for a new topic that has not been researched by too many students.

Preliminary Research Makes the Search Easier

If you are having difficulty finding a topic that is new and noteworthy, there are a few things that you can do. The first step is to do a little research to find a few ideas that are interesting to you. Then, you should see if those topics have been overdone. If they are new ideas, check to be sure you will be able to conduct research and actually find useful information and reading material. You can also meet with your adviser to find out if the topics you are considering are actually viable. Then begin to revise and refine your ideas to meet the requirements of the thesis committee.